Article by Matt S.
As our regular readers would know by now, we have launched a Kickstarter to fund the production of a book on the topic of games as art.
And core to that book will be interviews with some of the games industry’s most prominent artistic game developers. With that in mind, I thought we would do a series of developer profiles to introduce you to some of the developers that you’re perhaps not as aware of.
If you want to hear more (much, much more) from these developers, then please do back the Kickstarter; it will provide you with some genuinely unique insights into how games are made, straight from the minds of the developers that make them.
Hidetaka Suehiro has a record in the Guinness Book of Records; his surrealist horror game, Deadly Premonition, is the most divisive game of all time, getting a critical response that ranges from as low as they go right through to near-perfect scores.
Surely that in itself is a sign of pure art; if it can divide opinion that much it means that it’s a work that people have thought about, and certainly people still discuss and debate Deadly Premonition, three years after its initial release.
Deadly Premonition is, of course, not Hidetaka’s only work. His first project was a scenario producer for the Neo Geo’s The Last Blade. He then moved on to design Tomba! 2, before becoming the writer/ director of Spy Fiction and Deadly Premonition.
Hidetaka than moved on to work on a couple of PSP games: Lord of Arcana and Lord of Apocalypse. And now he’s busy putting the finishing touches on Xbox One release D4.
There’s so much that we can talk to Hidetaka about for his interview in The Interactive Canvas. As one of the deeper thinkers in the Japanese games industry, he has a lot of deep insights into creativity and artistry indeed. It’s going to be a classic interview, so be sure to reserve your copy of the book now!
– Matt S.
Editor-in-Chief
Find me on Twitter: @digitallydownld
